Amerika

When we speak of natural order, we are talking about an active pattern, or series of mathematical or logical interactions, that provide invisible structure to our world. This natural order has one warrior so fearsome that none successfully challenge him.

Who is this mighty warrior? J.R.R. Tolkien offers us a clue in The Hobbit.

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Tolkien uses a slick piece of narrative for Bilbo to get this one right. The answer, of course, is time. Bilbo Baggins succeeds by accidentally by yelling “Time!” the way Chris Webber accidentally called time out in an infamous college basketball game.

Sometimes life just steers us all in the right direction despite our own bumbling ineptitude. Other times, we end up like Chris Webber. This generally results from one major character flaw: hubris. Nobody since Oedipus does hubris like feminists.

But time is the stronger force, and feminists and all who have followed them are losing to time. Heat Street explains the existential angst of the “selfish career woman” below.

While it’s commonplace for snooty, liberal academics to blame men for every misery to betide humanity, boffins at Yale have taken this sexist blame-game to absurd new heights. They are claiming that modern men are too stupid – or “feel threatened by their success” – to date 30-something “selfish career women,” who are increasingly having to freeze their eggs until they meet men they deem worthy of siring their children.

Reasonable intellects can argue over whether these women are selfish, irresolute, or simply misled concerning the gravity of the life choices they were making. What is not up for debate is the fact that the old Michelob ads telling them “you can have it all” were lies. You can’t have it all, I can’t have it all and the Man on the Moon can’t have it all.

What each of us can have is that which we want more than anything else. If you really commit, go all in, and keep focused until it happens, you can probably achieve one great or significant goal in life. But now the vile hate truth kicks in. You, I and that dude up on the moon all have limitations.

Those are both general and specific. There are not enough hours in a day; this rules us all. But on a more personal level, if you have the natural physical grace of Michael Jordan, you are not going to have the g-loaded IQ of Michael Faraday. Even if you have both, you are going to have to decide which one gets the time and attention that will make you either genius or champion.

These limitations lead to stories such as the sad tale of a professional woman in England who never really understood that she had to pay her nickel and make her choice.

I never really yearned for a baby – until it seemed as if it might not happen. In my twenties, I was too busy travelling around the world for my career in overseas aid. I loved my job, and I always assumed babies would happen when I met someone.

Then the relentless and remorseless hand of time began to walk this woman down like a bounty hunter loose in the deserts of forevermore…

It was well before the wedding that we started trying for a baby. But after a couple of years, I was lurching towards 40 and still sitting in airport lounges. It was only then that I began to really long for a child. It began as a rising panic that I would never feel that love, never hold a small hand in mine and walk to the park to feed the ducks. My husband felt the longing just as keenly.

It turned out better for this woman than for many others I have known. She got her two kids and now ages gracefully as they become teenagers and will soon set off to be wards of the state somewhere. But there are so many sad stories this article doesn’t go into. Stories people who are younger versions of this poor woman need to hear. I would almost run out of fingers and need to remove a shoe if I were sadistic enough to count the number of older women I have known who tried to get pregnant in their late 30s or early 40s who wound up miscarrying or giving birth under the agony of c-section.

Life consists of trade-offs. Just as nature is composed of forces in balance, time requires that we choose one path to the exclusion of all other paths. We can either have a super-successful family or a super-killer career. A woman who settles with a man of honor and decency, and then bears her young in the flower of her youth will be statistically very unlikely to ever need the services of an IVF clinic. She will probably succeed in natural childbirth that requires an epidural at worst. She will also probably never get anywhere near the bigshot corner office at the law firm (or whatever useless NGO provides “overseas aid,” a government boondoggle of epic proportions).

That goes for the man in the relationship as well. Practicalities such as home prices in competitive urban centers and the time required to be a father to a young boy instead of just a sperm donor will require the truly-engaged dad to give up on that same corner office. This gives us yet another Hate Truth. Our leaders are too often short-term thinkers who couldn’t care less about the lives of the children that they do not personally have.

The death of the West comes from existential misery associated with “doing the right thing.” What society wants you to do is paradoxical to what you need to do. Many, who would produce great and outstanding children who could lead us to greatness tomorrow, take themselves out of the game today because there are not enough hours in the day to both “succeed” and succeed at biology. At that point our hubris is punished, and we die out from being too clever and not intelligent enough in our choice of social order.

Tags: children, extinction, family, reproduction